Tag: Rift

Developer Epic Games revealed Bullet Train today, an FPS for the Oculus Rift virtual reality device, during the Oculus Connect 2 conference in Los Angeles. Made with Unreal Engine 4, this game supports the Oculus Touch controllers, which can map the movements of your hands in VR. Virtual reality can become a big deal in gaming, but it will need great software to attract consumers. Epic has a track record of making hits with series like Unreal and Gears of War.

“Master the art of teleportation, time manipulation, and close-quarters combat to blast through resistance forces,” Epic notes in a press release sent to GamesBeat. “Thanks to Unreal Engine technology and the Oculus Touch motion controllers, you can physically interact with an array of weapons, from guns to grenades to missiles, and even feel them through haptic feedback.”

Oculus has an amazing virtual-reality controller solution, but it won’t ship with the consumer version.

Oculus’s Touch controllers won’t ship until the second quarter of 2016, according to the company’s presentation at Oculus Connect today. That is an entire quarter after the Rift goes on sale in Q1 2016.

The company spent a long time talking about the possibilities and importance of Touch. This enables people to bring their hands and fingers into VR, which seems like a crucial step to give people a feeling of presence. So it feels like a missed opportunity for the company not to launch the Touch at the same time as Rift.

That missed opportunity is potentially exacerbated by the fact that the SteamVR-powered HTC Vive will launch with its touch-style controllers before the end of the year.

Minecraft: Windows 10 Edition is going to support Oculus Rift, we learned today at Oculus Connect in Los Angeles. Founder Palmer Luckey of Oculus VR announced that Microsoft will bring its block-building phenomenon will support the head-mounted display when it launches in Q1 of 2016.

This is a big get for Rift, which will need high-profile content to help convince people that spending the money to invest in VR is worth it.

Minecraft on Rift is also notable because Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson once called Facebook’s acquisition of the Rift “creepy.” Although, now that Microsoft owns Minecraft, Persson’s opinion on Rift doesn’t matter.